New and Old #53
Why People Are Acting So Weird, The Atlantic, Olga Khazan, March 30, 2022
The pandemic has created a lot of “high-stress, low-reward” situations…and now everyone is teetering slightly closer to their breaking point.
This checks out. There’s a feeling of general frustration in the air. Many of my friends have expressed the feeling that their minds are sort of desiccated or under-nourished. For me, the uptick in prices, combined with lingering restrictions and service shortfalls, makes it less fun to go out on a whim. Other people, of course, have suffered or lost far more than I or my friends have. The health aspect of the pandemic seems to be winding down, but I wonder how long the emotional, mental, and commercial fallout will last.
Also, read this bit:
Rudeness can be contagious. Porath has found that at work, people spread their negative emotions to their colleagues, bosses, and clients—even if those individuals weren’t the source of the negativity. “People who witness rudeness are three times less likely to help someone else,” she told me. She thinks people might be picking up on rudeness from social media and passing it on. Or they might be logging in to a Zoom meeting with their overwhelmed boss, getting yelled at, and then speaking a little more curtly to the grocery cashier later.
Today is Good Friday, the end of Lent, and I’ve tried to think of this weird pandemic period as a sort of extended Lent: a chance to cultivate patience, to do with less, and focus on more important things. Nonetheless, that’s something of a gloss over a bad situation, and as Khazan later notes, extended disruption and isolation is probably really messing with us in ways we don’t fully understand.
She even notes that masks probably made this worse, because they make fellow people literally faceless. I have found myself muttering behind a mask at the supermarket, in a way that I would just keep to myself if there were no masks.
I suspect we’ll be talking about these pandemic after-effects for a long time.
Don’t Let Congress Slash Exports of Used Gadgets, Bloomberg Opinion, Adam Minter, March 31, 2022
Kind of like zoning, secondhand markets are an arcane but omnipresent thing:
The fastest growing niche of the global smartphone business isn't the latest, greatest upgrade. It's used phones, and American companies are leaders in supplying them to consumers at home and abroad. It's a commercial success story with environmental and social benefits. But thanks to a provision hidden in a sprawling legislative trade- and industrial-policy package recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, that trade is now in jeopardy.
There’s an outdated view of the secondhand trade, especially for electronics, that’s about dumping junk on poor people in other countries. That happens, but it’s far from the whole story. Adam Minter is one of the few people writing about this realistically. Read the whole thing, and check out his two books as well. (I reviewed one of them here.)
Philadelphia’s Chinatown, though damaged by the disgraceful Vine Street Expressway, is an intact, functioning neighborhood, unlike, say, Washington, D.C.’s Chinatown, which has no grocery store and only one or two Chinese restaurants. (D.C.’s Chinatown is effectively Rockville, Maryland, which is its own whole story.)
My wife and I find Philly’s Chinatown to have excellent food, and the architecture is varied and old. Take a look at this neat block, for example:
And read the story, which is an in-depth history of a single Victorian structure that’s still standing in Chinatown.
An ode to Tokyo’s Nakagin Capsule Tower, The Economist, April 16, 2022
There’s a right-wing anti-urbanist meme that goes “I will not live in a pod.” Well, Tokyo tried it, literally, and maybe it isn’t such a good idea.
Each cuboid has a round window that evokes both space travel and the ancient architecture of Kyoto. They contain built-in living spaces composed of bath units, beds, desks and household electronics. Kurokawa Kisho, the building’s architect, envisioned his cramped “capsules” as dwellings for what he called Homo movens, or highly mobile modern humans, such as the businessmen who lived in distant suburbs and worked late in Tokyo offices.
The built-in electronics are very cool. The fanciest option included a Sony reel-to-reel tape deck (look at the third photo in this tweet). I hope somebody at least saved one of those electronics consoles for a museum or something. They’d certainly command nice money on eBay!
This is an example of how architecture is both art and function. The building is cool—like any number of retro commercial buildings out there that become the subject of historic preservation fights—but at the end of the day, it’s there to serve a useful purpose. Cities can’t treat obsolete or decrepit buildings as curious set-pieces. Just like I suggested “keeping the sign” in regard to those retro buildings earlier this week, maybe one single pod should have been kept and displayed in the lobby of the new structure. That’s the way preservation basically has to work except for the most valuable, historically important structures.
Related Reading:
Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekend subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive of over 300 posts and growing—more than one full year! And you’ll help ensure more material like this!
Did you forget the link for the capsule tower article?